In many applications, the cost of maintenance man hours has created a need for maintenance free devices. This is particularly true of subsea devices which lie many hundreds or thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean.
In subsea oil production, when a cluster of wells have been drilled and completed, a vertical conduit or plurality of flowlines must be connected between the wells and the surface facility for processing the oil and gas before transporting to a refinery.
In many instances the surface facility is a floating vessel requiring the flow-line bundle end terminations to be flexibly connected at the surface.
Normally, this requires several pipes in a flowline bundle, each pipe must be a continuous conduit from the surface to the seafloor. The connections between these pipes must be made easily and solidly. Normally, the sections of flowline pipes have been joined by screwing clockwise each pipe into a coupling. Rotation of the coupling in a counter clockwise direction could result from dynamic motions and thermal variations. One means of preventing this occurance is to weld the coupling and pipe with a steel strip member. Another means would be to apply an epoxy adhesive to the pipe threads. Both of these methods are time consuming when joining or breaking out the connections.